In an earlier blog article I highlighted the profound inadequacy of the user documentation for USPTO’s Patent Public Search system. Here is yet another example of this inadequacy. In the screen shot above I quote, in its entirety, the USPTO’s user documentation for the search field “ASTC”. I defy any public user of USPTO’s Patent Public Search system to make any sense of this inadequate documentation. What, pray tell, do you get if the “assignee type” that you search for is “02”? What other numerical values can be searched for, and what do they mean?
Here are the answers:
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- 02 – to US company or corporation
- 03 – to foreign company or corporation
- 04 – to US individual
- 05 – to foreign individual
- 06 – to US government
- 07 – to foreign government
- 08 – to county government
- 09 – to state government (US)
But wait! It turns out that the first digit can be a “1”, in which case the two-digit code identifies a “part interest”. So for example a type code of “12” yields over a thousand hits in the Patent Public Search system. A type code of “14” yields over two thousand hits.
A prize goes to the first reader who posts a comment below, explaining how I somehow managed to winkle out these eighteen “type codes” from the USPTO web site.
My guess is you looked at patents for which you or your firm paid the issue fee online, and you know what you entered for “entity type”, and you then searched using that astc thing and crossed it with you or firm’s name as attorney of record, and were able to figure out what the codes are.